Tombstone Summoner
by dionysianDaydream
Summary: As children we made a deal with death that changed the course of our lives forever. Even if the odds are stacked against us, we will make things right.
1. Reunion

She had been the sole resident of room 14 of the Endsville Asylum B Ward for four years when I was discharged from duty and could return home, feeling less like the snot-nosed boy quivering in his army greens I was when I left, and more like a man who has been molded into something more.

"She's gone, man. That girl is absolutely batshit insane." One of the caretakers tells me as he was leading me through a confounding maze of hallways, the agonized screams of the real whackos and crazies reverberating off the walls as we went.

"She won't shut up about demons and how the end is near." He says, flailing his arms around like the damn Sophomore he was. When I tell him that I still wanted to see her despite the warnings, he laughs. "Well that's your call, buddy. I'm warning you though - she isn't right in the head. Not by a long shot."

The more time I spent with this guy, the stronger my urge was to shove the knife in my right boot down his goddamn throat, but I took a deep breath and held it in. Be like regular old Billy, I said to myself, don't be _I have seen entire fucking villages be blown up and stacks of dead men, women and children tall enough to cast a shadow_ Billy. Or else they'd lock me away too, and then she wouldn't be the only one up shit creek without a paddle.

"Here's your stop, big fella." The jack ass says as he unlocks the door to Room 13 of Ward B. As he opens it he starts to run through the safety procedures again but I just wave it off and shove past him, which I guess was a fair enough indicator that I wanted him to piss off because he does.

Once the door slams shut behind him, I am left alone with a girl quietly gazing out the loosely barred window.

"I wish I could have come back sooner." I say, although the Mandy I knew was never satisfied with apologies. But, as I looked around the room I wondered just how much these freakin' sociopaths change her over the past nearly half a decade.

Drawings are glued to nearly every wheelchair accessible space on the four walls, all of them featuring pale white skulls against chaotic, colorful backgrounds scribbled out in pen, pencil, crayon, or whatever the heck else she could get her hands on.

She must have known it caught my attention, because the first thing I hear come out of her mouth is an explanation for her sudden artistic inspiration.

"I still see him after all these years." She said as she turned her wheelchair around to look at me, in a voice as weak as she looked: pale, thin, and with rounded stubs where her legs had once been. "I feel him, Billy, and I know you feel him too."

"Yeah, he's growing stronger." I say, and I wasn't lying either. The best way to describe it is like the heat you feel when you stand near an oven, only it was less intense and I felt it throughout my entire body. This sixth sense is what brought me back home, back to her. In a way this shared sense inextricably linked us.

"We have to stop him."

Although as timid looking as a person on the verge of breaking in more ways than one, the confidence in her voice was clear. From our short exchange I already knew we were on the same page, and nothing more had to be discussed about him and our desire for revenge against him.

Him, the hellborn entity that made Mandy like this by taking away her legs and her soul if such a thing exists. Later we could talk about Grim, but for now we would take baby steps in piecing together our shattered lives, even if it was just long enough to retrieve what was lost.

We were going to get back what Grim stole from us.

I take off my sunglasses and look into her sunken black eyes. They still possessed the same dark and very Mandy allure they did when I last saw her. "First things first, I'm breaking you out of this hellhole." I said, and God help whoever would dare get in our way.


	2. Revisit

We took the next train out of town when it turned out the guys at the asylum weren't willing to contest a claim to one of their longest staying patients.

I carry Mandy outside on my back and, as she took her first few breaths of unconditional freedom since God knows when, I dared to ask her snarkiness what they were like.

"Like what? How they smell? Taste? The air is worse than I remember. Smells like it's going to rain hydrochloric acid. And, it smells like you need to invest in some deodorant."

Good old Mandy.

"If you're just gonna bitch about everything, maybe I should've let you stay locked up." I say with a laugh.

"What happened to the water tower?" She points at the tall, scorched looking metal structure situated on a forested cliff that overlooks downtown Endsville.

"Looks like it got struck by lightning." ...is my first guess. The great black blot was now present over half of its surface was indicative enough, and the bolt must have been huge. "Haven't been back in town for more than a day, so I wouldn't know."

She doesn't say anything else until we get to the bus stop just outside of the traditional black iron fence that bordered the Asylum premises.

"Did they work you hard in Iraq, Billy?"

"Afghanistan."

"Same shit, right?"

Pretty much.

...

The first half of the bus ride feels about as awkward as I expected. We hadn't spoken for so long that it would take time for us to feel comfortable in each other's company again, even though we were the only persons on that bus.

She mostly just stares out the window, commenting on the little things she notices have changed over the years like the new Burger King they built on Main Street or the restoration job on the school we used to go to. But after a while, she shares with me her interest in how many things remained virtually the same.

"Everything has that drab, gray look to it. Bored, dull." ...all words that could be used to describe the expression on her face. "Lifeless is the word I would use to describe it."

"The orphanage is still like that. Broken windows and all."

She turns to me sharply.

"Which reminds me, I haven't been there in a long time."

So we got off at the orphanage and immediately, memories began flooding back to me.

To think, we lived in this rickety, rundown roach infested old shithole for six years. It was here that Mandy and I first met, and it was also where we met him.

It is an old fashioned two story countryhouse with a wide front porch leading to a chipped, engraved dark cedar double door. The walls are painted in a clashing white paint job that is peeling off all over, but to my recollection had never been complete since the day I first learned that I was to call this pathetic shack 'home'.

And here I am now, Big Boy Billy gone to war and come back, just to end up right back where he started...

Mandy, who hangs on to me with her arms draped over my shoulders, tugs at my shirt to get my attention.

"Having fond memories?" She asks, and I don't have to see the sarcastic grin to know it was there.

"Bull fuckin' shit."

"Wanna check if the cellar doors are open?"

"Doesn't look like anybody's home, so maybe if we're lucky." I tell her, and feel my heart rate quicken at the thought of going down there again but at the same time I knew that I had no choice.

...

I find us a way into the back yard through a gap in the tall picket fence. After helping Mandy through, we're surprised to see how much the previous owners decided to leave behind.

There's the swingset...that toy tractor I used to fight with that one kid over...the ole tire swing is still hanging...that stuffed bear looks familiar...

It was like a nostalgic scavenger hunt, but checking out some long forgotten toys wasn't why we were here, so we didn't dawdle for long.

No siree. The main event was waiting for us in the space below the house, just past a pair of crooked cellar doors.

One problem: they were padlocked shut.

"Hold on, these are rusty as hell."

I set Mandy down on the grass, whip out the combat knife in my shoe and get to work repeatedly grating it against one of the chains.

"What will we do if the circle's still there?"

"I'll destroy it myself."

"What if...it's still there?" She asks hesitantly.

I flash the knife at her. "Then I'll kill it. Myself."

"You don't have to prove to me that you're stronger now than you were when you were eleven."

As I feel my anger rising, I take it out on the chain, which is surprisingly resilient. "If I were stronger back then, you'd still have your legs, and he would still be alive."

"Don't be so hard on yourself. You were just a kid, Billy."

"Well, so were you-"

The chain breaks in half, startling me. I put the knife back into its sheath, but keep it on hand. You know, just in case.

We both just sit there looking into the murky depths of the cellar for a solid minute. It's weird, like, the same emotion just came over both of us. No, we couldn't just go; we had to take a moment to breathe and prepare ourselves first.

"Well, let's go." Mandy finally says.


	3. Milkshakes

"There's no going back now, Billy."

"I know. But, we have to try...for her." Billy says, more for his own benefit than anything.

The body of a recently deposed feline lay at the center of a sigil drawn unto the flat cement foundation by a red crayon. Kneeling at two opposite sides of the sigil are Billy and Mandy at eleven years old, with the latter still in possession of all her limbs.

At the same time they both clap their hands together then after hesitating briefly, the children lay their palms flat against the wax-marked floor.

"Wait!"

The children look up, pulling their hands away from the floor.

A third child - one bespectacled boy with slicked black hair covering one eye - runs toward them, from leaning against the wall where he had been watching, squeezing his beloved teddy bear so tightly that its eyebuttons were beginning to come loose.

"You changed your mind, Nergal?" Mandy asks in disbelief.

The boy nods decisively, and joins them kneeling around the sigil.

...

A photograph on a dresser features a dozen children lined up dressed in matching grey uniforms. A young Billy stands next to a wheelchair bound and legless young Mandy whose arms are wrapped around a teddy bear, at the center of the shot.

"Humankind can not gain anything without first giving something of equal value. That is the first law of summoning." Says Mandy off-screen.

Tongues of fire are reflected on the glass face of the photograph.

"Back then, we thought that was life's one and only truth."

...

Young Mandy cuts her palm with a kitchen knife and the blood sprinkles over the makeshift magical mark.

"That should be enough, right?" Mandy says, and looks between the two expectantly. "Well, aren't you going to contribute?"

"I thought you said that was enough." Billy protests, but Mandy slides the knife across the ground to him.

"I meant for me, stupid." She casts a sharp look at Nergal. "Put that bear away. This is neither the time nor place for snuggling."

Billy yelps as the rusty blade rips through his flesh, making Mandy and Nergal flinch.

His pouring blood creates a small puddle on the floor.

"Looks like Billy gave enough blood for the both of you. Well..."

She stops to inspect the intricate design of the sigil she stayed up all night drawing, one last time. It was her first time attempting a summon this extravagant, but she could not allow Billy the slightest whiff of her uncertainty, an objective made all the more difficult considering that big wonking nose of his. Milkshakes was his cat after all, whose eternal soul was now on the line.

"Are we really gonna do this?" Nergal asks.

Mandy presses her hands against the floor again. "For Milkshakes."

Billy nods. "For Milkshakes."

Nergal nods at each of them then, after clapping his hands together he presses his hands unto the floor, letting his teddy bear slide off his lap and fall to the ground.

...

We were just kids, and she was our best friend. That's all that mattered.

...

"Mandy! What did I tell you about playing with that boy?"

An eight year old Mandy winces expectantly, but this time her father did not hit her. That would come later, somewhere where no one would see. Not out here in the school parking lot.

"Why can't he just be my friend, daddy?"

Daddy. The word stung worse than the tender pink slashes flayed across her back like the territorial clawmarks of a wild bear. It was what she had to call him in public so as to keep up the facade of a warm and loving, perfectly normal family he had invented, to cover up the truth about his private world.

"I've already explained this to you a dozen times. You serve a special purpose, and you are not to be tarnished in preparation for it." I try to look away but he just pulls me back. "It's for the good of mankind, Mandy."

That's what he always said. And whenever he did, I knew that there would be lashings. "For the good of mankind" ironically made me begin to slowly hate all of mankind, and to this day I haven't learned what he meant by it.

Eventually the secrets behind our perfect family, and the true identity of my father were released when, as I hear it, my mother had evidently grown so jealous of my father's many affairs that she felt the need to get back at him in the worst way possible.

As everyone in Endsville would come to learn as a result, these affairs were actually endorsed by the Satanic cult my father had secretly been a member of since before I was born. And he was the Head Priest of the Endsville chapter so, in other words, he twisted the rules to justify his own sleeping with multiple women, many of which were underage. Very classy.

He told me from birth that I must lead a clean life, detached from the trappings of an ordinary life. 'Friends' were excessive. 'Fun' was excessive. Disobedience was 'sin'. Being raised like this, I rebelled every chance I could get and it made me cold, uncaring, aloof. By the time social services could stick me in the orphanage,

But that all began to change when I met Billy, who as fate would have it was already living at the orphanage.

I first saw him sitting at the back of the lunch hall all alone, occasionally glancing at something under the table or on his lap. Being the new kid, I figured my best bet to gain some notoriety among the other kids was to humiliate somebody. I figured the big nosed kid with the Mickey Mouse hat and cheap Salvation Army denim jacket was an easy target.

"What exactly are you doing?" I asked, taking a seat across from him.

I remember he looked up sharply, brow sweating, mouth puckered awkwardly; his stupid guilty face.

"Nothing. I'm not doing anything."

"So does that mean you're just sitting here playing with your Johnson?"

Billy gave me a confused look, like he wasn't sure if I was letting him off the hook or not. "Johnson?" He asked with as much uncertainty underlying it as Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski.

"You know, your little Billy."

He still just shrugged. The dip. Seeing that there was no sense in making fun of a boy too stupid to know what he was being laughed at for, I took a more direct approach.

"So what's that you got there anyway?" I lean over the table and catch a glimpse of his backpack before he hides it underneath his crossed arms. "Come on, I just want a peek."

"I don't want you telling nobody."

"But I would never do that!" I lie, pretending to be offended. It was the old guilt trip tactic, and it seemed to work because then he started to get real fidgety, like he was suddenly conflicted.

"Fine." The sucker says after some thought, and once he was sure no one was watching, let me look into his bag, with a strange warning. "Just don't scare her."

Assuming that he was referring to something stupid like a ladybug, I was surprised to see a pink, furry animal poke its head up.

"Is this...a cat?"

"Yeah. I found her outside, in the bushes. I think I'm gonna call her Milkshakes."

I was awestruck. I had never been this close to a real life cat before, because my father strictly forbade it.

"Well, how do you know it's a girl?" I asked, as Milkshakes was rubbing her head against my fingers.

"She doesn't have a dinger, that's how."

A dinger. That's what he called it. What was I expecting?

"She's swell, isn't she, uhh..." He trails off with one finger on his lower lip.

I roll my eyes. "My name is Mandy, dipshit. And don't you dare forget it." Milkshake purrs as she licked my fingertips. That sandpapery texture I felt for the first time creeped me out.

"Alrighty then, Mandy dipshit. How's about we be friends?"

...

A sliver of electricity that was like a lightning bolt straight out of Hell, blue like my mother's eyes, flies out of the ground. Straight out of our handmade gate to Hell.

"It's working, Billy. Sweet pudding it's working!"

I glance at his smiling profile, then at Nergal, who had a weird expression I couldn't decipher. Perhaps if I did, we would have stopped right then and none of this would have ever happened.

"Nergal?"

The sparks flicker, leaving behind grey scorchmarks as they bounce off the walls. The faint smell of something burning fills the cramp cellar.

"Milkshakes!" Billy screams at the blue blaze glowing at the center of the sigil.

...it was only then that I knew something had gone horribly wrong.


	4. Dirty Business, Part 1

As the pale blue flash of light dissapated, a sharp pain swept over my body starting from the lower half of my left leg. When I looked I realized with horror that the whole leg was gone; instantly snatched away by the dreadful circle and replaced by a bloody stump.

It was equivalent exchange - my leg for the life of an alley cat; our poor innocent Milkshakes who was taken away from us in an instant - there when Billy and I became friends in the first place - and yet here we thought a few drops of blood would suffice.

We suffered because we were children trapped in the illusion that all lives are worth saving.

"Nergal? Billy?"

I could hear them both screaming, but could not see through the dense smoke that was still rising from the summoning circle. Not to mention the bulb of the only light in the basement had shattered when a stray electric bolt hit it, so my eyes had to rely on the pale moonlight seeping in through a tiny window.

Lying in a prone position, I turned around to witness the same kicking and screaming Nergal that would haunt my nightmares to this very day.

"It's pulling me in, Mandy! Help!" he yelled, as dark tentacles roped around his wrists and ankles, then his neck; slowly dragging him toward the glowing blue gate to Hell.

I only had a few seconds to think, and even less time to scrawl another circle unto the floor with the dull piece of chalk I had tucked in my pocket.

He looked to me pleadingly.

"They're going to take me, Mandy! Please don't let them take me!"

I cringe now, remembering how his fingernails bled from how desperately he clawed at the cement floor to try and free himself, as I hastily drew a second circle on the bare knee of my one remaining leg.

It is then that I looked up briefly, and caught a glimpse of Billy.

He was curled up in the corner with his face hidden in his hands, sobbing.

...

A photograph on a dresser features a dozen children lined up dressed in matching grey uniforms. A young Billy stands next to a wheelchair bound and legless young Mandy whose arms are wrapped around a teddy bear, at the center of the shot.

"Humankind can not gain anything without first giving something of equal value. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is the first law of summoning." Says Mandy off-screen.

Tongues of fire are reflected on the glass face of the photograph.

"Back then, we thought that was life's one and only truth."

...

Billy and I could not stay in that basement for long, as our memories of that night sunk deep into our bloodstreams like poison from a snake bite.

For a moment, the hard look on his face melts away as we quietly examine the dry blood stains still streaking across the floor in some places. I guess that deep down he really is still the same Billy that cowered in the corner bawling his eyes out, no matter how much he has endured.

"You know it wasn't your fault, Billy," I said to him, as the next bus we get on roars to life.

"I'd like to believe that."

He grunts, then tilts his hat so that the shade conceals his eyes.

I ask him about where our next stop will be, only to receive a vague 'to meet up with an old friend' as an answer.

The bus rolls through a dimly lit tunnel with colorful graffiti plastered on the walls, where the amplified racket of its rattling tires was almost deafening, until it turns unto a crumbling, potholed street flanked by a homely hair salon here, a discount store and a gas station soaked in the penetrating scent of diesel over there.

'Run down' is what I would call this part of Endsville, and I am overwhelmed by a strange feeling I nonetheless push to the back of my mind as when we get off at a bus stop with shattered glass panels we are greeted by a tough-looking crowd of I what smells to be heavy smokers and drinkers.

A youngish Mexican dude wearing a plain white T-shirt and baggy jeans that hang below his waist approaches us as Billy is having a tough time trying to carry me on his back, the bag with all of his stuff in it and my walker off the bus in one go.

"Here, let me help you out a little there, soldier," the guy says, stretching his arm to take the folded walker from Billy.

I can feel the muscles in his neck and shoulders tense up, but thankfully he does not protest. This is definitely not a good place to pick a fight - our hombre's friends were watching nearby, with their backs leaned against a shiny black convertible parked on the sidewalk; rocking their heads to the beat of festive Spanish music blaring on the radio.

Unfortunately the other guy doesn't know when to leave us alone.

"Hey man, do you need anything?" He asks, deliberately blocking our way.

"Do I look like someone with a lawn that needs mowing?" Billy tries to sidestep past, but he just moves in front of him again.

"C'mon, you know what I'm talking about."

He retrieves from his pocket a small plastic bag filled with what looks like sugar, but I'll much sooner attempt to ride a bicycle down main street than believe that that's actually what it is.

Billy seizes him by his shirt collar, and pulls him so close to his face that I can smell the cologne beneath the bar stank.

"Get the hell out of my face with that shit," he snarls.

"Billy..."

From the corner of my eye I can see the crew by the convertible getting antsy, and pinch Billy's shoulder to get his attention when a series of clicks sound off in my ear, coming from the opposite direction.

I turn to look and see three black guys standing further down the sidewalk, three loaded handguns pointed our way.

Talk about being stuck between a rock and another rock.

"You _Diablos_ should know better than to be stepping on our turf," one of the guys from the pistol packing second gang says in a deep voice, as he takes a step forward. "And you there - soldier boy!"

He cocks his head at Billy, grinning with what I gather to be amusement.

"Welcome home, brother."

Billy walks over to him and to my surprise they knock knuckles like old friends.

"So this is the kind of shit you've been up to since they sent you home, huh Irwin?"


End file.
